The Cottage Hospital poem – John Betjeman poems

At the end of a long-walled garden in a red provincial town,

A brick path led to a mulberry- scanty grass at its feet.

I lay under blackening branches where the mulberry leaves hung down

Sheltering ruby fruit globes from a Sunday-tea-time heat.

Apple and plum espaliers basked upon bricks of brown;

The air was swimming with insects, and children played in the street.

Out of this bright intentness into the mulberry shade

Musca domestica (housefly) swung from the August light

Slap into slithery rigging by the waiting spider made

Which spun the lithe elastic till the fly was shrouded tight.

Down came the hairy talons and horrible poison blade

And none of the garden noticed that fizzing, hopeless fight.

Say in what Cottage Hospital whose pale green walls resound

With the tap upon polished parquet of inflexible nurses’ feet

Shall I myself by lying when they range the screens around?

And say shall I groan in dying, as I twist the sweaty sheet?

Or gasp for breath uncrying, as I feel my senses drown’d

While the air is swimming with insects and children play in the street?

 

***

 

More poems by John Betjeman:

• Winter Seascape poem – John Betjeman poems
• Winter Landscape poem – John Betjeman poems
• Westgate-On-Sea poem – John Betjeman poems
• Verses Turned… poem – John Betjeman poems
• Upper Lambourne poem – John Betjeman poems
• Trebetherick poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Plantster’s Vision poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Olympic Girl poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Licorice Fields at Pontefract poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Last Laugh poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Irish Unionist’s farewell to Greta Hellastrom in 1922 poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Hon. Sec. poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Cottage Hospital poem – John Betjeman poems
• Sun and Fun poem – John Betjeman poems
• South London Sketch poem – John Betjeman poems
• Slough poem – John Betjeman poems
• Senex poem – John Betjeman poems
• Seaside Golf poem – John Betjeman poems
• On a Portrait of a Deaf Man poem – John Betjeman poems
• Myfanwy poem – John Betjeman poems
• Mortality poem – John Betjeman poems
• Middlesex poem – John Betjeman poems
• Meditation on the A30 poem – John Betjeman poems
• Loneliness poem – John Betjeman poems
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